Please tell me there’s another way to see it: The way we as a culture consume doof and chase comfort and convenience over meaning and purpose, people using heroin, fentanyl, and other serious drugs aren’t an aberration from our culture, they’re it’s future.

They aren’t behaving qualitatively different than, say, someone who buys from McDonald’s, Trader Joe’s, or other doof place. They differ only quantitatively. I don’t blame any of them. Few people choose to become addicted, but even if someone got trapped in addiction, it’s unfair, but only the addicted person can unaddict themselves, whether they’re addicted to fast fashion, flying, doof, social media, gambling, or meth.

To clarify, I don’t post about syringes and addiction to bring people down, but to avoid denying and suppressing an important part of our culture. It won’t go away if we ignore it. It pervades every part of our culture: Washington DC, Silicon Valley, academia, every profession, and so on. It’s not just a poverty issue, though it causes a lot of poverty and dependence. The opposite of denial and suppression is self-awareness—critical to leading others and yourself.

Anyway, I posted about some things I love and find beautiful in Philadelphia: the coop my family grew up shopping at and my sledding hill in August. I also took the subway and saw the syringe pictured below. I took the subway to school in junior high: a bus to a bus to the subway, then a few blocks’ walk.

I’ve posted plenty of syringe pictures before. I wrote in my post: More syringes in our shared world and addicted culture, June 2023:

Syringes discarded in the park mean out-of-control addiction. By out of control, I don’t mean in the addict. I mean in our culture. People shooting heroin, fentanyl, and meth in broad daylight are only one of the more blatant examples of our culture of addiction.

Facebook, McDonald’s, doof in general, social media in general, TV engineered to binge-watch, bucket lists, and so on par. At least heroin harms the user most. If you use the others, since they pollute and deplete so much, you’re probably hurting more people than the heroin users.

In case the picture didn’t show it, I zoomed in:

• ← My Sledding Hill, August 2023
• Do you think like a nineteenth century anthropologist? →